Alice got scared. She was afraid the man was dead. From the beginning she hadn’t violated the rituals of that black room. She’d stay firm in her place on the bed and he was the one who’d come close and move away. But he stopped coming close. He’d enter the room, she’d notice a shadow entering, he’d throw himself down next to her and go to sleep. He even stopped kissing her. Alice wanted to know if his eyes were open or shut. She spent three days sleepless over this question. She went up close to him, but this time he didn’t move or push her away with his right hand as he usually did. She went up close to him and kissed him. He was cold and tasted like a dead fish. Alice put her hand on his waist and he pulled back a little. Alice didn’t know what came over her. A kind of anger inflamed her entire body when she saw him pull back, and she shouted.
“What do you want from me! Who the hell are you?”
She heard snoring, or something that resembled snoring, and she got the feeling the man was trying to stand up. She grabbed onto him, by his shirt, and his shirt almost tore in her hands. She went closer and laid on top of him and began kissing him. It was as though something were raging inside her. The man stayed still like a dead fish. Alice doesn’t remember what happened exactly. She went down. She left his side and moved down to the bottom of the bed. She grabbed him by the balls and started to pull. When she grabbed him she didn’t intend anything, but he didn’t move, he just stayed there, totally still, his breathing increasing only slightly. Alice pulled harder and screamed, and amidst her hysterical screaming she heard him screaming, too, as if he were yelping like a dog. He pushed her and stood up.
“You, you!” she shouted.
“Hush, hush,” the man sighed as he stood there.
“You are ‘The Leader.’ I know you, you son of a bitch.”
He ran around the room and then he disappeared.
Alice ran away. She said no one objected to her leaving. The next day she went to the airport and returned to Beirut.
Lieutenant Tannous didn’t run away. It seemed his wife found out. On one of those mornings while Tannous was shaving before leaving for his house, with Alice standing by his side in the bathroom, watching the shaving cream on his face and the razor sliding and turning his face into a mirror, the doorbell rang. Alice put her robe on over the nightgown she was wearing and opened the door. She was shocked. She couldn’t open her mouth.
“Are you Alice?” the woman asked.
“Yes. Come on in.”
Alice’s body trembled slightly.
“Where’s Tannous?”
“Please come in, Ma’am.”
The woman came in. Tannous’s wife had blond hair, long eyelashes, a full figure, and skin as white as snow.
“Tell him I want to see him.”
“Make yourself at home.”
The woman sat on the edge of the sofa and Alice sat in front of her, not knowing what to do.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“I told you I want him. Where is he?”
Alice left her there in the middle of the room and rushed to the bathroom to find Tannous naked in front of the mirror, totally confused. All of a sudden Alice noticed his paunch, which was getting bigger, and the hair on his back, which was like an ape’s. She told him; she tried to tell him. He motioned to her as if he wanted to stop her voice from coming out. He got dressed in a hurry and went to the living room. Alice hesitated before following behind him, and then she saw him as he really was.
Alice said it was the first time she really saw him. Before then she hadn’t seen him for what he was. And now there he was, standing there, his wife standing there next to him. Alice leaned over the side entrance to the living room, alongside the dining room, and didn’t say a word.
His wife asked him for a divorce.
“Divorce me, Tannous. Divorce me and marry this whore, I don’t care, but let me go. They told me, but I wouldn’t believe it. George’s wife told me, but I didn’t believe her. She told me, Your husband is having an affair and you think he’s out working all night. You’re an idiot. She told me I was an idiot. And you’d come home early in the morning tired and dead. I’m the dead one now.”
She started screaming and threw herself onto the floor, trembling. Alice thought she might have passed out, so she ran to the kitchen and brought some orange blossom water and sugar and kneeled over her.
“Get up. God help you.”
The woman pushed the flower water away and stood up.
“Come with me, you son of a bitch, I’ll tell everyone about you.”
At this point something strange happened. Alice was expecting Tannous to yell at her or hit her, but instead he bowed his head to her and went home.
And whenever Alice would remember him after that, she’d think of a white puppy dog with his tail between his legs. Maybe it was because she’d told the story so many times and she’d always end it by saying, “He put his tail between his legs and followed her home.” Or maybe it was because of his white pants and white shirt, everything about him was white when he left. Like a white puppy dog with his tail between his legs.
He disappeared for a whole week. Then he came back and told Alice he loved her, but he couldn’t live with her anymore.
She told him it was over, that she’d packed up his things in a suitcase and would leave the house at the end of the month and she’d rented a small apartment in Ayn Mraysi.
When she said good-bye to him she didn’t feel anything. Even when he insisted on making love to her and she accepted, she didn’t feel anything. Then came the sorrow. She was struck with a grief so terrible she couldn’t talk about anything anymore. At one point she considered committing suicide and almost did with a leather belt she bought for Tannous’s thirty-third birthday but never gave him.
He had told her, It’s only three months until I turn thirty-three and die, just like Jesus Christ.
At the time, Alice laughed at him and his illusion and she went out and bought him the belt. But he left before his birthday came.
Alice was frightened by the religious spells that overcame that man. Often after sleeping with her he’d start praying in Syriac. He’d chant an entire Maronite liturgy naked and then he’d begin his political speech.
She took the belt and decided to hang it from the ceiling and kill herself. She got a chair, stood on it, and tried to tie the belt to the metal ring attached to the ceiling for the light bulb. She tied it to the ring and came down. She burst into tears and climbed onto the chair, but instead of hanging herself she untied the belt. She got down and ran to the porch and threw it. Then she burst into a mixture of laughter and tears.
When Gandhi listened to these stories he felt stupid, because he had no stories like these of his own to tell. He lived a life of safety and stability. His few adventures into the whorehouse passed without much excitement; watching the television, the woman watching and refusing to take off her bra and telling him to hurry up — none of these was stories worth telling.
On the other hand, the story of his daughter was entirely different, and the suffering she caused him while he took her from sheikh to sheikh. This was a story that made him sad and quiet. And Husn didn’t care about anything except Madame Nuha. But why? Was it because he was jealous, or because he really loved her, or because she gave him money? Husn never told anyone the real story about that woman. Actually, he told Rima a little bit of it. He told her about his feeling of superiority with her, of feeling like a complete man.
Husn didn’t tell the truth and the truth cannot be told. That’s what he believed, because when it is told it becomes like a lie, and then it loses its importance. Instead the story itself becomes the issue.